21st Century 3D-Printing Within the Medical Field

3D printing covers a series of Additive Manufacturing technologies that utilize a layer-by-layer material accumulation procedure to manufacture parts.

3D printing has been an extremely argued technology among several industries, opinions on what it includes, its potential and challenges often vary vastly.

3D printing covers a series of Additive Manufacturing technologies that utilize a layer-by-layer material accumulation procedure to manufacture parts. This procedure has been utilized for more than three decades for swift prototyping purposes, primarily to diminish the number of design iterations. In an additive process, a product is formed by placing down consecutive layers of objects until the complete object is created. All of these layers can be seen as a finely segmented into a horizontal cross-section of the ultimate object.

Applications of 3D printing in medicine

Today, 3D printing is evolving as a cost effective, proficient, and modified processing option for the medical industry. It is now applicable to a varied range of devices. For example, dental implants, hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, custom-made knee and hip implants and other devices. This technology guarantees to deliver on many counts such as personalization according to the demand, flexibility, reduced material wastage, exclusion of specialized tooling, and short lifecycle prices. Combined with the development of the 3D printing process (in terms of better material and technological innovations), the technology of 3D printing can be employed to develop various new medical devices that were previously deemed difficult to produce, or not patient friendly.

Advantages of 3D printing in medical sciences

3D Printing can bring more profit than just the ability to develop new devices. Specialized equipment costs and stringent regulatory processes are the two of the greatest obstacles that most of the manufacturers face when launching a device to market. 3D printing has the ability to minimize the cost of specialized equipment, enabling lower lead time and narrow compliance requirements when compared to the traditional methods. 3D printing was estimated to be $700 million industry in 2014, where only 1.6 percent is invested in medical applications that is approx $11 million. However, recently it’s projected that this industry will reach billion dollars in the coming decade where the medical application takes the quarter part of it.

Through early implementation of 3D printing technology, it can help producers of medical devices to cut on costs leading to cheaper medical facilities, while also dropping the time-to-market and manufacturing different equipment and devices.